I just saw a new house go up in my neighborhood-and it looks ancient. It has mullioned windows 9of a style from about AD 1600), a brick chimney (1400), and a front entrance withfaux-Greek columsn (300 BC). In short, this house is built to look as old as possible. How come people don’t build modern houses? I mean, we can have nice glass block walls 9lots of light), big windows, and get rid od those ancient chimneys! Yet people WANT their new houses to look old-why? You ceratinly would not buy a car that looked like a 16th century horse drawn coach!
If they could do it without absurdly high cost or loss of function, I’ll bet that there are plenty who would.
People like the way older houses look – and I don’t think it’s all or even mostly any sort of classist idea. I really don’t like glass blocks, myself. Large windows still lead to more heat loss (even with well-insulated windows, which are more expensive). Chimneys look nice, and are so exspected that I’ve seen faux chimneys made of metal painted to look like brick chineys on houses with heating systems that require flues but not chimneys. (In their favor, rectangular brick chimneys look a heckuva lot nicer than bare metal pipes protruding from the roof).
And I have to admit that I’m not that fond of a lot of modern architecture. I don’t like utilitarian, soulless glass-and-steel boxes. I think Frank Gehry’s stuff is ugly, and I REALLY dislike BRUT architecture, with its unrepentently ugly cast concrete that looks like hell when it rains. I love Art Deco, and buuildings with a little (but not too much ) ornamentation. “Machines for Living”? Gaahh – who wants to livre in a machine?
To my uneducated eye, it looks all pointy and aggressive. I don’t like that.
Diff’rent strokes.
Is this an attack on modern architecture, or anything from over most of the past century which has any modernist or Bauhaus influence? 
Probably because 98% of the modern architecture that was foisted on the public by the ridiculous architecture intelligentsia was complete and utter garbage that only served to alienate the public.
That said, cheap architecture with vinyl siding and faux stone is just as atrocious.
Minimalism is not very forgiving of mistakes. If you don’t get the proportions of that tidy white box juuuuust right then it’s crap. I’ve seen some stunningly beautiful modernist buildings – the Getty Center comes to mind. But mostly they’re forgettable, or worse, assaultive. Even the worst traditional building ususally has something to like about it – a pleasant little detail here or there, a touch of charm in an otherwise disasterous composition.
Bear in mind that capital M “Modern” architecture is now antique, it can still appeal to that within us which requires a air of tradition to provide a sense of security.
As has been well-established, the flaw of Modern was that Big Ideas + Big Funding didn’t take into account what living with the stuff would be like. It takes a great chef to prepare a meal good enough to be enjoyed if eaten in a concrete plaza at a concrete picnic table among concrete planters. But most of the people who have to do so also have to eat equally bad food there too, unlike the people who provided both the big ideas and the big funding.
Still, when done right, modernism is great. Compare The Salk Institue’s relation to the sun, sky and sea of California to the monstrosity of the old Sutro Bath’s “context be damned.” attitude.
Not only that, but my impression is that it is particularly unforgiving of imperfect maintenance, i.e. being slightly dirty and decayed affects the look of modernist buildings more than it does older ones.
Absolutely. Le Corbusier’s best buildings are simply beautiful, and also are popular, even (gasp!) among people who live in them.
Boxy and antiseptic. No warmth. Architecture for androids.
IMHO
Mild hijack, but… I have to say, the Cliff House image made me smile. I think it’s genuinely funny. I guess the architect probably wasn’t aiming for that effect, but it is. I’ve seen contemporary building designs where the architect was intentionally trying to be funny or ironic, and I think it hardly ever works as well as that does.
James Howard Kunstler posts an Eyesore of the Month, usually an egregious example of modern architecture. Commentaries thereon go a long way towards answering the OP. In his books, he makes a strong case that the whole modernist movement in architecture – based on mechanistic functional considerations, coupled with esthetic standards newly invented – was a mistake. Classicism (broadly defined) is timeless because it encodes certain aspects of the human condition: Human beings have a top, middle and bottom, therefore these are included clearly in the classical orders. Traditional vertical windows represent human beings in an upright posture, horizontal windows suggest a person who is asleep, having sex, or dead. Modernists eliminate unnecessary ornament, classical architecture repeats it at several descending scales to produce a harmonious whole.
This is all bound up with a systematic critique of individual buildings’ relationship to one another in their built environments – e.g., traditional walking-scale mixed-use towns and neighborhoods vs. sprawling auto-dependent all-residential suburban PUD pods and commercial strip malls.
I actually don’t hate all modernism despite my many condemnations of it. But I don’t think that either of these pictures really prove your point all that well. While, yes, the Salk Institute looks good in the light of that photograph, it is still harsh, austere, and institutional. With regards to the Cliff House, yeah the way it’s built over the cliff obviously wouldn’t stand up to the test of time, but if you slid the building back from the edge, it would look absolutely fine. Even as is, the building, though impractical, worked. Who thinks this doesn’t interact spectacularly with its context?
You know what, I looked at the picture of the Salk Institute a little more and I want to withdraw the slight praise I gave it. Really, the only thing that it is successful at is being the setting for photographs. There is absolutely nothing in the architecture of that building that in any way, shape, or form is the least bit inviting for actual human beings. There are plenty of places in Antarctica that make a nice picture too, but no one would actually want to spend any time there. Thats the effect that the Salk Institute creates.
We’ve done this a thousand times before and IMO it’s one of the most frustrating sources of doper ignorance.
I don’t know why, but modern architecture is the only period or style that is characterized by its worst examples, every other period is characterized by its good examples.
If you think modern housing was “Boxy and antiseptic [with] No warmth” you need to check out Richard Neutra or Rudolph Schindler.
That’s exactly right…modernism is about proportion, and it’s hard to get right. And if you don’t get it right, there’s nothing to fall back on to please the eye.
What a bunch of crap. Vertical windows restrict your vision, producing a feeling of confinement. Horizontal windows allow you to see (as your eyes work) panoramically.
I think you’re critiquing photography rather than architecture.
The people that work there would disagree with you. (Sorry I can’t find a cite, but scientists have talked about being inspired to do good work by the architecture.)
Also, it is a testament to the designers’ brilliance that the building still works so well. Bio-medical & genetic research was in its infancy then. Salk told Kahn he had “no idea” what the building’s functional needs were. It remains one of the premiere places to do such research because so much flexibility was planned for.
It’s because modernism has produced so many bad examples. I’m not trying to be facetious here. I rarely see a modern building that I like. Most of them are godawful ugly; some are just grey eyesores that I ignore. It’s very rare that I look at a modern building and say “wow”. That’s not my experience with other types of architecture.
I don’t disagree about the quality of the buildings you linked to, but what I find frustrating is the oft repeated defense that modern is characterized by its worst buildings while we selectively remember only good buildings from the past. My rebuttal to this, which I’ve offered before, is that the ratio of good to atrocious buildings in modernism, brutalism, and the like is unconscionably high. For every quality modernist building you can cite, I can find dozens examples of the style which are horrific failures. No other historic style has that kind of dismal record.